Just a quick video to let you know that Japan has just announced that it is going to make everyone, even primary school students, AI-literate within the next few years. The Japanese government wants primary school children to be as familiar with AI as they are with the 3Rs. Facing a severe skills shortage of technicians, Japan is having to rethink its entire tertiary system and government governance of technical infrastructure, which includes a massive reskilling operation. AI is deemed to be a key plank of Japan's economy in the near future. But skilled AI technicians are in short supply and Japan's immigration policies are being looked at with a view to opening the country up to foreign workers.

The use of robotic tutors in primary school classrooms is one step closer according to research recently published in the open access journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. Dr Imbernòn Cuadrado and his co-workers at the Department of Artificial Intelligence in Madrid have developed an integrated computational architecture (ARTIE) for use with software applications in schools. "The main goal of our work was to design a system that can detect the emotional state of primary school children interacting with educational software and make pedagogic interventions with a robot tutor that can ultimately improve the learning experience," says Luis Imbernòn Cuadrado. Online educational resources are becoming increasingly common in the classroom, although they have not taken into sufficient account that the learning ability of primary school children is particularly sensitive to their emotional state. This is perhaps where robot tutors can step in to assist teachers.